In the tech world recently, there have been plenty of calls for, say, Sundar Pichai or Mark Zuckerberg to resign. And those have been featured on HN. What's the difference here? If you're a Powerful Person in Tech (or industry or politics), that's just part of the gig.
"It sucks to have haters, but every founder who now runs a huge company faced this for a long time."
https://blog.samaltman.com/dont-read-the-comments
In this case, the author cites facts about Berners-Lee and his performance at the W3C. Each one is supported by a link to evidence. I don't agree with the author's conclusion. But if this community is so "fragile" that it needs to bury fact-based arguments, wowsers.
We don't need the callout/shaming culture on HN. If the facts in the article are important, someone else will write a factual article that doesn't have a side channel of putdowns and snark. Then we can have a thread based on that article instead.
I suppose I should add that I have no opinion about Tim's role in web governance, only about Hacker News.
We try to avoid posts that are personal attacks, not necessarily because we owe celebrities better, but because this kind of internet denunciation degrades the community, even if it also makes some good points. I think that's probably why users flagged it.
Trying to prevent the community from degrading is more important than any individual post, as it's the container that supports good discussion in the first place. The container is fragile. It's more fragile than it seems, because much of the work to prevent it from falling apart isn't visible.
Posts that feature indignation over information are always bad for curious conversation. When the indignation is directed against an individual, that's a multiplier of badness, because it brings out worse in others.